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ON JUNE 1, 2001, I came to in a cross-legged seated position on the living room floor. Sunlight was needling through the blinds, illuminating crisscrossed planes of yellow dust that blurred and waned as I squinted. I heard a bird chirp.
I was alive.
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AS I’D REQUESTED BACK in January, Ping Xi had laid out a set of clothes for me on the dining table: sneakers, track pants, T-shirt, zip-up hoodie. My credit cards and driver’s license, passport, birth certificate, and a thousand dollars cash were in the envelope I’d sealed and given him to hold. There was a bottle of Evian, an apple in a plastic bag from the grocery store, and a sample-size tube of Neutrogena sunscreen—a thoughtful touch. The table had been cleared of all the Post-it notes, which I appreciated, but then I found the cluster in the trash, like a tossed-out bouquet of daisies. I picked one up and read it: “Don’t forget: clothes, shoes, the envelope, keys. Buy me some sunscreen, please.” And then on another one, “Thanks, good luck.” A smiley face.
My old white fur coat hung on the hook by the front door. A Post-it note stuck to the wall read: “When I bought this for you, it was simply because I wanted you to have it. I’ll really miss working with you. PX.”
The door was unlocked.
I got dressed, put the coat on, went out and down the elevator to the lobby and made my way dizzily toward the light exploding through the glass doors onto the street.
“Miss?” I heard the doorman say. “Can you hear me?” Then the stiff rustle of his uniform pants as he squatted down and cradled my head in his hands. I hadn’t realized that I’d hit the floor.
Someone brought me a glass of water. A woman held my hand and sat me in a leather armchair in the lobby. The doorman gave me the egg salad sandwich from his brown-bag lunch.
“Is there anyone we can call?”
People were so nice.
“No, there’s nobody. Thank you. I just had a dizzy spell.”
It took another week until I had the strength to make it outside and walk around the block. The next day I walked to Second Avenue. The next day, all the way to Lexington. I ate prepackaged egg salad sandwiches from a deli on East Eighty-seventh. I sat for hours on a bench in Carl Schurz Park and watched the lapdogs doddling around a tiled, fenced-in area, their owners dodging the sun and clicking at their cell phones. Someone left a collection of books out on the curb one day on East Seventy-seventh Street, and I brought them home and read them all cover to cover. A history of drunk driving in America. An Indian cookbook. War and Peace. Mao II. Italian for Dummies. A book of Mad Libs that I filled in myself using the simplest words I could think of. I passed the days like this for four or five weeks. I did not buy a cell phone. I got rid of the old mattress. Every night at nine I lay down on the smooth hardwood floor with a stretch and a yawn, and I had no trouble sleeping. I had no dreams. I was like a newborn animal. I rose with the sun. I did not walk south of Sixty-eighth Street.
By mid-June, it was too hot to wear the tracksuit Ping Xi had left me. I bought a pack of white cotton panties and plastic slip-on shoes from the 99 Cent Store on 108th Street. I liked it up there, almost Harlem. I paced slowly up and down Second Avenue in red or blue gym shorts and oversized athletic tees. I got in the habit of buying a box of Corn Flakes from the Egyptians each morning. I fed the Corn Flakes in gentle handfuls to the squirrels in the park. I drank no coffee.
I discovered the Goodwill store on 126th Street. I liked looking at things other people had let go of. Maybe the pillowcase I was sniffing had been used on an old man’s deathbed. Maybe this lamp had sat on an end table in an apartment for fifty years. I could imagine all the scenes it had lit: a couple making love on the sofa, thousands of TV dinners, a baby’s tantrums, the honeyed glow of whiskey in an Elks Lodge tumbler. Goodwill indeed. This was how I refurnished my apartment. One day, I brought the white fox fur coat with me to the Goodwill and handed it to the teenager taking donations through the door around the corner from the store entrance. He took it calmly, asked if I wanted a receipt. I watched his hands smooth the fur, as though he were assessing its value. Maybe he’d steal it and give it to his girlfriend, or his mother. I hoped he would. But then he just threw it in a huge blue bin.
In August I bought a battery-operated radio and carried it with me to the park each day. I listened to the jazz stations. I didn’t know any names of the songs. The squirrels flocked to me as soon as I uncrumpled the bag of Corn Flakes. They ate straight from my palm, tiny black hands crunching into the cereal, cheeks ballooning. “You pigs!” I told them. They seemed perturbed by the music coming out of my little radio. I kept the volume low when I fed them.